Facts & Data

Engineering Today

Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering is top-ranked for its education and research programs. The School of Engineering is a leader in computational science and engineering and simulation and modeling. With pioneering research in nanotechnology, Rice’s School of Engineering has made significant contributions in bioengineering, materials science and energy. Its strengths in information technology include high performance computing, compilers and digital signal processing.

The School of Engineering at Rice has a tradition of giving students a sound foundation in the fundamentals of engineering but today, those fundamentals must be augmented by experiential learning and "soft skills." The "three ships"—Leadership, Internships and Entrepreneurship—help our students develop teamwork and communication skills, give them real engineering experience, and for those who are entrepreneurially inclined, provide resources to turn ideas into startups.

Collaboration is the key to engineering research at Rice. Faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates and research scientists work with researchers from across campus, across the street in the Texas Medical Center, across town in the energy sector, and beyond, to tackle some of the most challenging problems of our times.

Facts & Data

Engineering Today

Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering is top-ranked for its education and research programs. The School of Engineering is a leader in computational science and engineering and simulation and modeling. With pioneering research in nanotechnology, Rice’s School of Engineering has made significant contributions in bioengineering, materials science and energy. Its strengths in information technology include high performance computing, compilers and digital signal processing.

The School of Engineering at Rice has a tradition of giving students a sound foundation in the fundamentals of engineering but today, those fundamentals must be augmented by experiential learning and "soft skills." The "three ships"—Leadership, Internships and Entrepreneurship—help our students develop teamwork and communication skills, give them real engineering experience, and for those who are entrepreneurially inclined, provide resources to turn ideas into startups.

Collaboration is the key to engineering research at Rice. Faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates and research scientists work with researchers from across campus, across the street in the Texas Medical Center, across town in the energy sector, and beyond, to tackle some of the most challenging problems of our times.

Data Race Detection for Event-Driven Parallel Runtime

To tackle heterogeneous architectures and fully utilize ever-increasing hardware complexity, the event-driven parallel (EDP) runtime is a growing trend in the high-performance computing area. EDP runtime allows the programmer to focus on program logic, such as control dependence and data dependence, without worrying about low efficient program tuning. However, the applications written on top of the EDP runtime remain vulnerable to data race. Existing data race detection tools either do not support the primitives in EDP runtime or fails to utilize the structural information of the program which incurs unnecessary overhead.

In this dissertation, we propose a graph-traversal based data race detection method for event-driven parallel runtimes. It leverages reachability graph (encodes the dependency of a program), to check the happens-before relation between memory accesses. In order to reduce the time complexity on race detection, we propose a few optimizations, such as reachability cache and reversed reachability graph to avoid unnecessary graph traversal and path compression to reduce the number of iteration during graph traversal. Based on our race detection technique, we have developed a prototype for the Intel Open Community Runtime (OCR). The evaluation on the OCR benchmarks shows that our tool handles all OCR constructs and the time overhead for race detection is comparable to past works.